This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

High speed broadband will create energy bottleneck and slow Internet, new University of Melbourne study Media Release, Tuesday 25 November 2008A surge in energy consumption resulting from increased uptake of broadband will further slow Australia’s Internet, according to University of Melbourne research to be presented this week at the Symposium on Sustainability of the Internet and ICT.“Increased services like Video on Demand will put pressure on the system and create an energy bottleneck,” said Dr Kerry Hinton of the University’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the ARC Special Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN).

In a world-first model of internet power consumption, University of Melbourne researchers have been able to identify the major contributors to Internet power consumption as the take-up of broadband services grows in the coming years.

"It has now become clear that the exponential growth of the Internet is not sustainable, “said Dr Hinton.

The result indicates that, even with the improvements in energy efficiency of electronics, the power consumption of the Internet will increase from 0.5% of today’s national electricity consumption to 1% by around 2020.

Dr Hinton says the growth of the Internet, IT broadband telecommunications will provide a wide range of new products and services.

New home services include Video on Demand, web based real-time gaming, social networking, peer-to-peer networking and more. For the business community, new services may include video conferencing, outsourcing and tele-working.

“To support these new high-bandwidth services, the capacity of the Internet will need to be significantly increased. If Internet capacity is increased, the energy consumption, and consequently the carbon footprint of the Internet will also increase.”

“This will place a major burden on the nation’s power infrastructure as well as significantly contribute to green house gas production.”

Hinton says major ICT and Internet based companies are already experiencing difficulties due to the size and power requirements of servers, routers and data centres.

The model includes the entire network infrastructure required to provide the increasing traffic volumes arising from proposed new high-bandwidth services.

“Increasing amounts of energy will be needed to power and cool Internet equipment that provides high speed broadband.”

“If service providers don’t update their equipment, energy consumption will soar, but then cost of updating may also be prohibitive.”

“This model is important because it shows us where we must focus our efforts to ensure the Internet is energy efficient. If we don’t do this, the Internet will not fulfil the social and economic promise many of us are expecting of it,” Dr Hinton said

The research will be presented at “Symposium on Sustainability of the Internet and ICT” hosted by The ARC Special Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN) 25 – 26 November at the University of Melbourne.

“The Symposium on Sustainability of the Internet and ICT is the first technology symposium in Australia to bring together researchers and practitioners involved with the design and deployment of the Internet, today and into the future,” he said.Highlights of the program include

Recent Publications

About Me

Bill St. Arnaud is a R&E Network and Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation research and education and Internet networks. He also works with clients to develop practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and dynamiccharging of eVehicles (See http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/) . View my complete profile